He said that everything said within the four walls of this room would be safe. He said that out of twenty four hours in a day its not too much to ask for one of them being spent being yourself. He asked if it was possible to love one person every day for the rest of your life and i said yes, but i don't know if you can without losing pieces of yourself. And before you go into it i think you must ask yourself how much you're willing to lose.
I'm tired of running from my ghosts and ghouls. I can honestly say i have nothing to say to them anymore.
Behind closed doors, through the tiny window in the wooden door, i saw her collapse. I saw her fall into her mother's arms and i looked away, ashamed to have once again been witnessing a moment to which i was not invited. And i thought of dark circles under her eyes and a wrinkled tee shirt and the hollowness that appears when you're holding more secrets than you know what to do with. And i realized everyone has their own demons.
I said once that i hated secrets because too many and the weight of it can feel as though it is crushing your vital organs.
I didn't realize until it was too late that people can be hurricanes, forces of nature so destructive but so captivating. And i'm still learning that one person can be both the poison and the cure. Its ok to fall in love with a damaged little thing and its ok to love the same person through the shards of your mosaic heart and its ok. Its not a metaphor or an allegory, it just is. And maybe that has to be enough.
At the end of the day, crawling into bed, with a mind full of stories and a heart full of promises, sometimes it isn't enough. And there is no finely spun poetry in the world that can take the place of the truth that was never received and the words never said. There is no explanation, there is no reason, it just is. When that time comes, when the secrets and questions feel too heavy and threaten to crush your very bones, there is only one answer, one my mother told me when i was a child as she stroked my hair. "Sleep now, little one, it will all look better in the morning." Most days it does but sometimes it doesn't.
I remember him saying once that in cases of dire insanity to hug a tree. Wrap your arms around the trunk, he said, and hold on. I'm spending my days looking for the biggest oak.
I know this guy and once he sat beside me in the library. I was spending too much time staring at the wall and not enough time reading my text book and he asked me a question. I don't remember what it was but i remember that i had only been looking for a way to let all my secrets out. Because the weight of them in your arms, pressed against your ribcage, tucked up against your hipbone, running down along your spine, its heavy and it pushes and i shift in my seat with discomfort. The thing about secrets, i'm learning, is that they demand to be told. In whispered words to your childhood best friend in a garage tucked away behind the bicycles, in a journal, in a scream that shakes the earth and sends animals running and ends in shoulder shaking sobs. Secrets demand to be told or the threat settles into your bones. And i'm learning that i have too many word defying secrets.
He said that words are safe here, in this room filled with test tubes and diagrams. It feels like a place my secrets could come out of hiding if only i sat still long enough and ignored the discomfort that came with their claws on the inside of my skin. He says that there are twenty four hours in a day and for this one, in this room, you are allowed to be yourself. And i feel them like butterfly wings on the inside of my stomach. I spent a really long time running from what happened to me and i spent a long time being really uncomfortable in my skin and i feel the nudging inside of me, telling me its time to stop, time to be who i really am. The secrets don't seem so daunting here and it doesn't matter if there are no stone cold answers for my mind to chew on and mull over because my soul knows.
Here in the back corner of this biology lab my soul knows
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